Last Saturday I visited the book fair and purchased many books. Coromandel by Charles Allen was one of them and I read it on the flight to Chennai on Tuesday. I picked up the book because I had read a review/excerpt in Scroll. It was a delightful read.
Charles Allen prefaces it as a personal history and those who pick up the book to read about the various dynasties- Cholas, Pallavas, Vijayanagara, the Nayak Kings- are going to be disappointed. The book instead follows on who were the original inhabitants of the South India (Tamilnadu, Karnataka, Andhra, Telangana, and Kerala). So to my delight it picked up at Pothigai or the hill of Agastya that is located in Tirunelveli, our native place. There are many legends involving Agastya- both the North and South claim him to be theirs.
He then moves on to the origin of written language and how Ashoka helped in the propogation of the written script- Brahmi- which possibly is the originator of both the North and South languages.
If we talk about Ashoka, Buddhism and Jainism cannot be far behind. So the spread of these two religions in the South India is discussed. The revival of Hinduism- Shankaracharya- led to the disappearance of both these religions (Hindus, very cleverly, of course said that Buddha was an incarnation of Vishnu and adopted many of their practices, including vegetarianism).
A short detour into Orissa- Puri Jagannatha temple- to talk about how the older Buddhist and Jain shrines were appropriated by Hindus either forcibly or because they were abandoned with the decline of these two religions. I liked this chapter because it made me think a little bit. Our family deity is Yegnanarayana, a form of Vishnu (never mind that we are not Vaishnavites), in a small place called Perunkulum. The deity is formless. Only his foot prints are there in the temple. Now the early Buddhists worshiped aniconic form- Buddha's footprints for example. It made just me wonder.
The arrival of Islam- not across the Himalayas- but as traders from Yemen and Arabia coming to Malabar coast. The intermingling was encouraged for two reasons- one because the caste taboos prevented Hindus from carrying out trade across the sea and secondly because they brought with them horses. I also did not know that the oldest mosque of India exists in Kodungallur, Kerala.
Finally, he ends with the recent spate of rigid Hinduism. I just want to end the post with the quotation from Ashoka's edict that appears in the book, which I think is needed at the juncture we are as a country:
"Whoever praises his own religion, due to excessive devotion and condemns others with the thought 'Let me glorify my religion' only harms his own religion."
Charles Allen prefaces it as a personal history and those who pick up the book to read about the various dynasties- Cholas, Pallavas, Vijayanagara, the Nayak Kings- are going to be disappointed. The book instead follows on who were the original inhabitants of the South India (Tamilnadu, Karnataka, Andhra, Telangana, and Kerala). So to my delight it picked up at Pothigai or the hill of Agastya that is located in Tirunelveli, our native place. There are many legends involving Agastya- both the North and South claim him to be theirs.
He then moves on to the origin of written language and how Ashoka helped in the propogation of the written script- Brahmi- which possibly is the originator of both the North and South languages.
If we talk about Ashoka, Buddhism and Jainism cannot be far behind. So the spread of these two religions in the South India is discussed. The revival of Hinduism- Shankaracharya- led to the disappearance of both these religions (Hindus, very cleverly, of course said that Buddha was an incarnation of Vishnu and adopted many of their practices, including vegetarianism).
A short detour into Orissa- Puri Jagannatha temple- to talk about how the older Buddhist and Jain shrines were appropriated by Hindus either forcibly or because they were abandoned with the decline of these two religions. I liked this chapter because it made me think a little bit. Our family deity is Yegnanarayana, a form of Vishnu (never mind that we are not Vaishnavites), in a small place called Perunkulum. The deity is formless. Only his foot prints are there in the temple. Now the early Buddhists worshiped aniconic form- Buddha's footprints for example. It made just me wonder.
The arrival of Islam- not across the Himalayas- but as traders from Yemen and Arabia coming to Malabar coast. The intermingling was encouraged for two reasons- one because the caste taboos prevented Hindus from carrying out trade across the sea and secondly because they brought with them horses. I also did not know that the oldest mosque of India exists in Kodungallur, Kerala.
Finally, he ends with the recent spate of rigid Hinduism. I just want to end the post with the quotation from Ashoka's edict that appears in the book, which I think is needed at the juncture we are as a country:
"Whoever praises his own religion, due to excessive devotion and condemns others with the thought 'Let me glorify my religion' only harms his own religion."
